Preface

Seven years ago, in the midst of a global IT boom, programming shops of all shapes and sizes were racing like mad toward the next IPO, and the job market was hotter than ever. I had been pulled into the booming new media industry and was just starting my programming career, spending long days and nights hacking away at random pieces of code, configuring servers, uploading PHP scripts to a live production system, and generally acting like I knew my stuff.

On a rainy September evening, working late again, my heart suddenly skipped a beat: What did I just do? Did I drop all the data from the production database? That’s what it looked like, and I was going to get canned. How could I get the data back? I had thought it was the test database. This couldn’t be happening to me! But it was.

I didn’t get fired the next morning, largely because it turned out the customer didn’t care about the data I’d squashed. And it seemed everyone else was doing the same thing—it could have been any one of us, they said. I had learned a lesson, however, and that evening marked the beginning of my journey toward a more responsible, reliable way of developing software.